Musicians and the Web

Techdirt: Musicians Realizing That Access Is A Key Selling Point

While I've been writing this series of posts about the economic models involving non-scarce things like content and ideas, a key element of understanding the business models that come out of this is recognizing that a key, scarce component is access to the musician. Clive Thompson has written up a great article for the NY Times Magazines about how new musicians are discovering the two sides of this coin. Basically, they've learned that the internet and the ability to communicate with fans is a key element in allowing them to be successful in the first place. That is, it's that ability to go straight to the fans that allows them to have a music career at all. I particularly like the one musician who strategically tours by using his online presence to figure out if over 100 fans will show up at any particular venue -- and then will make plans to perform there. Nearly all of the musicians being profiled probably wouldn't be nearly as successful without their online presence, without promoting their music for free, without asking others to help them promote their music for them -- and without being around and being accessible to fans.

The New York Times article features Jonathan Coulton. The series of articles in TechDirt has been very instructive about the economics of non-scarce goods, and how to construct a viable business model that uses them to increase the value and profitability of traditional, scarce goods. This one and the NYT article have been particularly inspiring, but I'm not about to quit my day job just yet.

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Tracks!

Worked this evening on the tracks in About Bleeding Time that come from the Consonance 2007 concert, specifically "Cicero", "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of", and "Silk and Steel". The whole concert was plagued by feedback -- it was particularly bad on "Silk and Steel", which is a shame because it was, otherwise, a pretty good performance. The effect in the other tracks was mainly to add a high twanging effect to high notes on the guitar. I think I have it tamed now. Of course, since my hearing starts rolling off around 6KHz these days, who am I to judge? Go to the concert page and listen for yourself.

Also added album-specific descriptions to several of the tracks (you can see the results on the album page) and wrote code to get exact timings out of the track data files. This is important because large chunks of the web pages, the corresponing files on the CD-ROM, and the track lists on the album artwork are all automatically generated. Yeah, I know... I'm just geeky enough to spend several hours fiddling with scripts that do what I could do in ten minutes by hand. But if I have to hand-tweak the same file twenty times and get it exactly right every time, I come out ahead with the script.

The big push for the weekend will be to get the album artwork done to the point where I can print out samples, and cleaning up the database to the point where I can send out emails. After Baycon I can worry about putting the artwork into the proper format for sending off to the duplicator. Suggestions re: Oasis vs. Discmakers would be welcome. I've gotten significantly faster and friendlier response from Discmakers' customer service people.